aapi emerging artist fellowship
Viet Voices is excited to announce an open call for California’s first national AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship: Cycle 3, an opportunity for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) artists to engage with the art community and develop their professional practice from March to August 2026.
What is real when algorithmic economies continuously shape how we consume, feel, police, and desire? As artificial intelligence accelerates into a new industrial era, we wonder how our consciousness continues to expand and fragment through the cyber body.
Drawing from Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic”, we call upon artists who understand the erotic as a primordial essence — an embodied intelligence capable of disrupting systems that sever feeling from knowledge. How does technology and vitality interplay? What processes might balance our modern yet earthly existence?
Across internet ecologies and screen based culture, the human condition is increasingly trained for habitual dopamine rewards. Underneath lays older contracts: karmic cycles of debt and reap, intergenerational trauma, (para)social attachements, and ancestral duty. Karma is a lived practice, where our agreements in labor, relationships, and the body reach reconciliation.
We ask artists across all disciplines (especially in new media, social practice, performance, and installation): How does karma and the erotic challenge your work? What reaches activation, interruption, or completion in 2026?
Key themes include:
Karma (familial, financial, colonial, digital, ecological)
Erotic power and agency
Diasporic spirituality, ritual, and otherness
The body as archive and site of consequence
Technology, algorithms, machine & animal
We invite practices that treat art-making as transformative, reclaiming pleasure, grief, and intuition as ways of knowing; and that resists extraction through presence, community, and refusal.
About the Fellowship: The AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship is an artist-led program designed to support early-career AAPI artists and cultural workers who are at a pivotal stage in their artistic journey. The fellowship provides a nest for the development and presentation of new work while offering professional/personal development workshops alongside AAPI kin. We invite fellows to question what gathering looks like in cyberspace, and how to ritualize our (re/un)learning processes while in community. We seek contemporary artists who conceptualize beyond the commercial, and use art making as a pathway towards communal care. We commit to challenge censorship to experiment with the multiplicity of being.